AT&T Gets A Tiny Wrist Slap For Another Bullshit Wireless Fee

Scams

from the rinse,-wash,-and-repeat dept

At some point U.S. regulators effectively declared that it was okay to rip off consumers with a dizzying array of bogus fees, letting companies falsely advertise one rate, then sock you with a bunch of additional surcharges when the bill comes due. That’s particularly true of the cable and broadband industry, which has saddled consumers with billions in fees for decades, with little real penalty.

Case in point: since 2013 or so, AT&T has been charging its wireless subscribers an “administrative fee.” AT&T openly admits this isn’t a government tax or surcharge; it’s just a completely bogus bit of nonsense AT&T says “helps cover a portion of costs to AT&T related to wireless service.” But that’s what your full bill is for. What it really does is allow AT&T to nickel-and-dime you beyond the advertised price.

With regulators completely AWOL (a common theme on this front) a class action lawsuit attempted to hold AT&T accountable. But that lawsuit (Vianu v. AT&T Mobility) was quietly settled last week for $14 million, netting each impacted user a one-time payment of between $15 and $29:

that’s only a fraction of what AT&T’s own records show it charged: $180 per customer on average since 2015, according to documents. The settlement “represents a refund of approximately 6-11 months of the average fees,” they read. Meanwhile, the lawyers are likely to get $3.5 million.

This is, of course, why this kind of behavior never changes. The closest AT&T gets to any meaningful penalty here is a payout that’s a small fraction of the money it earned from the sleazy behavior over nearly a decade. Class action lawyers get a new boat, consumers get a tiny credit, and U.S. regulators remain too afraid to challenge AT&T, a trusted intelligence gathering ally.

This was a rare case where AT&T wasn’t able to kill the lawsuit entirely. And this, of course, was a class action lawsuit, which are usually blocked by AT&T’s fine print forcing binding arbitration, a process where the consumer usually winds up getting even less. Federal regulators, meanwhile, remain underfunded and underpowered (something AT&T lobbies routinely for), and around and around we go.

Filed Under: administrative fee, bogus fees, bullshit, consumers, ripped off
Companies: at&t

SafeGraph Stops Selling Location Data Of Abortion Clinic Visitors, But…

Privacy

from the drop-in-the-bucket dept

A few days ago, Motherboard revealed they were able to purchase the location data of visitors to Planned Parenthood clinics for just $160 from a company named SafeGraph. While SafeGraph refused to comment at the time, they’ve since written a blot post announcing they’ll be ending the practice. But not without spending much of the blog downplaying obvious potential harm:

…there are always extreme hypothetical corner cases, and in some cases these are worth actively preventing.

In light of potential federal changes in family planning access, we’re removing Patterns data for locations classified as NAICS code 621410 (‘Family Planning Centers’) from our self-serve “shop” and API to curtail any potential misuse of its data. 

Like the last dozen companies caught in location data scandals, SafeGraph implies this was all an over-reaction because they saw no examples of the data being abused (not that they spent much time verifying identities or looking) and individual identities weren’t exposed due to aggregation and anonymization:

SafeGraph also has a Patterns dataset that shows how groups of people interact with a place (fully aggregated and anonymized).  SafeGraph has always committed to the highest level of privacy practices ensuring individual privacy is NEVER compromised.  We use differential privacy to ensure anonymity. 

But there’s been just an absolute parade of quality studies showing how “anonymization” is meaningless, and user identities can be teased out of such datasets with only a modicum of additional data from other sources. That companies just keep pretending these studies don’t exist is both absurd and insulting. SafeGraph also sold this data with no user identity verification.

Obviously, the harm here is that abortion (and helping those seeking abortion) is criminalized in numerous states, and this data becomes useful for both law enforcement and politicians — but also potentially violent authoritarians who feel harassment efforts have been validated by an extremely unpopular right wing Supreme Court decision.

This cycle we’re in, where a company gets caught being cavalier with user location data, then only sheepishly backs away after a news outlet discovers the practice (while insisting they didn’t actually do anything wrong), isn’t working. There’s very often no meaningful penalty, no third party confirmation that the company has changed anything it claims to have changed, and no real incentive for other actors to stop misbehaving, since the financial cost is minimal to nonexistent and the reputation hit fleeting.

SafeGraph stopping this collection and sale doesn’t stop the countless other data brokers, adtech companies, telecoms, app makers, and big tech giants that are also routinely cavalier with user location and other data — including abortion clinic visitor data (in fact it took Vice all of a day to find another broker doing this same thing). All of this has been greenlit by regulators and lawmakers soaked in campaign contributions.

We’ve built a massive interconnected ecosystem of rampant data over-collection and monetization with little to no meaningful oversight, whether we’re talking about your broadband and wireless provider, prayer and meditation apps, or period tracking apps. This data has already been abused by a wide variety of cops, people posing as cops, criminals, stalkers, and others. Believing it won’t also be abused by a surging U.S. authoritarian right is dangerous wishful thinking.

Filed Under: abortion, adtech, authoritarians, consumers, location data, planned parenthood, privacy, telecom
Companies: safegraph

Data Brokers Selling Location Data Of Americans Who Visit Abortion Clinics

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the watching-you-watching-me dept

With the leaked Supreme Court ruling indicating the court is poised to effectively overturn Roe V. Wade, you can expect a new wave of worry about the weaponization and abuse of consumer location data, as states increasingly seek to criminalize abortion — and those aiding others seeking such services.

As if on cue: Motherboard’s latest scoop indicates that data brokers have been busily collecting and selling the location data of users who visit Planned Parenthood abortion clinics, including “aggregated” data on how long visitors were at the clinic and which census block(s) they traveled from:

The company selling the data is SafeGraph. SafeGraph ultimately obtains location data from ordinary apps installed on peoples’ phones. Often app developers install code, called software development kits (SDKs), into their apps that sends users’ location data to companies in exchange for the developer receiving payment. Sometimes app users don’t know that their phone—be that via a prayer app, or a weather app—is collecting and sending location data to third parties, let alone some of the more dangerous use cases that Motherboard has reported on, including transferring data to U.S. military contractors. 

Safegraph works with all manner of organizations and companies interested in tracking user movements in significant detail, including, it was also revealed this week, the CDC. Motherboard didn’t find it particularly difficult to purchase its own data trove, including recent visitors to Planned Parenthood, for $160:

SafeGraph classifies “Planned Parenthood” as a “brand” that can be tracked, and the data Motherboard purchased includes more than 600 Planned Parenthood locations in the United States. The data included a week’s worth of location data for those locations in mid-April. SafeGraph calls the location data product “Patterns.” In total, the data cost just over $160. Not all Planned Parenthood locations offer abortion services. But Motherboard verified that some facilities included in the purchased dataset do. 

Again, this data can be helpful to everybody from epidemiologists to city planners. But it’s also so incredibly lucrative, we haven’t implemented much in the way of any standards as to how it can be used (as to not stifle innovation, wink wink). As a result, it’s routinely collected without user knowledge or consent, sold without much in the way of safeguards, and distributed widely across countless industries.

As we’ve noted repeatedly, telecom, tech, app, and adtech companies all really enjoy claiming this kind of granular data collection and sale is no big deal because the data being collected is “anonymized.” But studies have repeatedly made it clear that “anonymization” is a meaningless term, since users can be easily identified with just a few additional datasets.

The same was true here, with the privacy impact of aggregation and anonymization being overstated:

SafeGraph’s data is aggregated, meaning it isn’t explicitly specifying where a certain device moved to. Instead, it focuses on the movements of groups of devices. But researchers have repeatedly warned about the possibilities of unmasking individuals contained in allegedly anonymized datasets. 

Sections of the SafeGraph dataset Motherboard purchased handle a very small number of devices per record, theoretically making deanonymization of those people easier. Some had just four or five devices visiting that location, with SafeGraph filtering the data by whether the person used an Android or an iOS device as well.

Safegraph didn’t want to respond to a request for comment.

Journalists have been documenting this specific threat to the safety of those seeking abortions for several years. Broader concerns about the harm of location data over-collection and sale aren’t theoretical. There’s been a parade of scandals by a wide variety of companies and services showcasing how the rampant over-collection and sale of location data causes immeasurable harm.

Scandals at Securus, LocationSmart, T-Mobile, Grindr, and others have all brutally illustrated how cellular carriers, app makers, tech companies, and location data brokers routinely collect, buy and sell your daily movement records with only a fleeting effort to ensure all of the subsequent buyers and sellers of that data adhere to basic privacy and security standards. That data is then abused by stalkers, criminals, law enforcement, and anybody with a few nickels to rub together.

While there’s often a lot of pretense to the contrary, U.S. lawmakers didn’t do anything meaningful to tackle this problem not because it’s difficult, but because a long list of industries and companies found the broken and dangerous status quo to be more profitable. And because those companies collectively lobbied a corrupt Congress into a state of perpetual dysfunction and apathy.

The check for that apathy continues to come due. And the idea that this location data won’t be abused by a surging U.S. authoritarian movement seeking to criminalize, vilify, and harass not just those seeking abortion — but those helping and caring for them — seems relatively naïve.

Filed Under: abortion, adtech, apps, consumers, location data, planned parenthood, privacy, smartphonw, surveillance, telecom, wireless
Companies: safegraph

Grindr The Latest Company Caught Selling Detailed User Location Data

Privacy

from the another-day,-another-problem-we'll-do-nothing-about dept

We’ve noted a few times now that while Facebook gets most of the heat for its privacy scandals, the stuff going on in the telecom, app, and adtech markets in regards to location data makes many of Facebook’s privacy issues seem like a grade school picnic.

That was well highlighted by the recent Securus, LocationSmart, and numerous T-Mobile scandals which showcased perfectly how cellular carriers, app makers, and location data brokers routinely buy and sell your daily movement records with only a fleeting effort to ensure all of the subsequent buyers and sellers of that data adhere to basic privacy and security standards.

The end result has been just an absolute parade of scandals, but little more than a few pinky swears by impacted companies, wrist slaps by regulators, and apathy by Congress. As a result it just keeps happening over, and over, and over again.

The latest case in point: the Wall Street Journal has discovered that the Grindr dating app has also been collecting highly detailed user location data and selling it to a wide variety of middlemen since around 2017 or so:

The commercial availability of the personal information, which hasn’t been previously reported, illustrates the thriving market for at-times intimate details about users that can be harvested from mobile devices. A U.S. Catholic official last year was outed as a Grindr user in a high-profile incident that involved analysis of similar data.

The data in question was made available through the online ad network MoPub (previously owned by Twitter) and then sold through its partner company UberMedia (recently renamed UM). Researchers had been warning about this problem for a while, and were largely ignored.

As usual, Grindr executives claim this wasn’t a big deal because the data was “anonymized” and didn’t include personal names. But as we’ve noted countless times “anonymization” doesn’t actually mean anything, given you can identify these users with just a few additional datasets. The data was also “detailed enough to infer things like romantic encounters between specific users based on their device’s proximity to one another,” the Journal notes.

Grindr states that the company cut off sales of this data two years ago, but, as usual with this kind of stuff, there’s no independent way to test or confirm that claim without the aid of whistleblowers and competent and capable privacy regulators. An insider tells the Journal that Grindr didn’t do anything about this until 2020 because it didn’t see the harm (and it continues to downplay the harm in the story).

Last year, a Catholic news outlet called the Pillar obtained the Grindr location data of Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, executive officer of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, forcing him to resign due to “serial sexual misconduct.” The company also came under fire for sharing some users’ HIV status with certain companies. The app also suffered from several vulnerabilities that exposed user data.

Grindr’s problems due to rampant over collection and sale of location (and other data) were bad enough that the report notes the app was used as an example in a presentation to multiple government agencies about the intelligence risks posed by over-abundant data collection and sale:

National-security officials have also indicated concern about the issue: The Grindr data were used as part of a demonstration for various U.S. government agencies about the intelligence risks from commercially available information, according to a person who was involved in the presentation.

Grindr’s Chinese owner Beijing Kunlun was forced to sell the app in 2020 due to national security concerns. But while DC loves to superficially hyperventilate about Chinese-owned companies and data collection specifically (see: the whole TikTok fracas), rampant data collection remains a problem with American-owned companies too, in part because that data still winds up widely available.

The reality is that the wild west approach to data collection and monetization causes an incalculable level of potential harm. Yet we don’t meaningfully address it because the sale of such data is simply too profitable for too many different industries (marketing, telecom, healthcare, insurance, banks, app makers), all simultaneously lobbying Congress to do either nothing, or the wrong thing.

As a result, we keep stumbling through the same stories week after week as if stuck in a bizarre Groundhog-Day-esque purgatory, with the key difference being that nobody in the U.S. seems to be learning anything from the experience.

Filed Under: anonymized, china, consumers, dating apps, location data, national security, privacy, tracking
Companies: grindr

Researchers Again Show How Major VPNs Quietly Undermine User Security

Privacy

from the first-do-no-harm dept

Given the seemingly endless privacy scandals that now engulf the tech, telecom, and adtech sectors on a near-daily basis, many consumers have flocked to virtual private networks (VPN) to protect and encrypt their data. One study found that VPN use quadrupled between 2016 and 2018 as consumers rushed to try and protect themselves in the wake of scandals, breaches, and hacks.

Unfortunately, many consumers are flocking to VPNs under the mistaken impression that such tools are a near-mystical panacea, acting as a sort of bulletproof shield that protects them from any potential privacy violations on the internet. Not only is that not true (ISPs, for example, have a universe of ways to track you anyway), many VPN providers are even less ethical than privacy-scandal-plagued companies or ISPs.

A Consumer Reports study late last year took a look at 16 top VPN providers, and found that the majority of them misrepresented their products or their data retention practices, and many of the companies actually put consumer privacy at greater risk. Only a quarter of the VPNs looked at clearly indicated how long they retain user browsing and other data.

Other VPNs simply don’t provide particular stellar security, despite marketing claiming that’s the entire reason they exist. For example, Surfshark, TurboVPN, Sumrando VPN, and several other VPN providers were recently accused of installing a trusted root certificate authority (CA) cert on user devices, often without user knowledge or approval.

This risky root certificate opens the users of these VPNs to increased risk of man in the middle or other attacks:

The installation of an additional root CA cert potentially undermines the security of all your software and communications. When you include a new trusted root certificate on your device, you enable the third-party to gather almost any piece of data transmitted to or from your device. 

Plus, an attacker who gets hold of the private key that belongs to a trusted root certificate authority can generate certificates for his own purposes and sign them with the private key.

For consumers, determining what VPN provides useful security and what VPN is a privacy and security dumpster fire isn’t easy, especially given how so many VPN reviews are little more than affiliate kickback blogspam. So while quality VPNs are still definitely useful, experts increasingly point out that unless you know what you’re buying and really need the protection, they’re often just not worth it.

Filed Under: consumers, privacy, privacy scandals, root cert, vpn

John Oliver Tries To Scare DC Into Doing Something About The Privacy Dumpster Fire That Is Adtech

Privacy

from the incompetent-by-design dept

We’ve noted for years that the adtech sector is a convoluted, unregulated hellscape, where consumer data is bought and sold with nothing remotely close to competent oversight. The end result is just about what you’d expect: a percussive parade of massive scandals in which location, financial, and other sensitive data is bought, sold, leaked, abused, hacked, and spread far and wide with little real recourse.

Despite this, the U.S. still hasn’t passed even a baseline privacy law for the Internet era. And while some folks will insist it’s because it’s too hard, the real reason is because there’s simply too much money being made; and wealth accumulation, if you hadn’t noticed in the United States, trumps all things.

Last week John Oliver did a fantastic bit explaining the (quite intentionally) complicated, ethics-optional mess that is adtech, with a specific focus on data brokers:

Oliver points out just some of the many scandals in the space (like that time Epsilon Data Management knowingly sold the data of 30 million elderly people to criminals who then scammed them repeatedly, or the time widely available cellular consumer location data was abused by stalkers).

But Oliver then does something entertaining: he reveals that his show directly approached data brokers and purchased the online behavior and location data of many people who are likely lawmakers working in or around the Capitol building. Oliver only makes a few vague nods to some of the questionable browsing activity he discovered, while hoping lawmakers are now motivated to do something about it:

“You might want to channel that worry into making sure that I can’t do anything,” he advised. “Sleep well!”

Again, I’d wager he may not have actually found much of anything about any specific lawmaker, but it’s an amusing feint all the same. And we desperately need something to motivate the entirety of DC, because what we’re doing now (inconsistent wrist slaps years after violations, fines that are a tiny fraction of the money made from the abuse — and, oh yeah, here’s some free credit reporting) isn’t working.

Again, if we actually cared about this stuff, it wouldn’t be that difficult to fix.

A fairly basic Internet privacy law, combined with actually funding and staffing regulators at the FTC, would go a long way toward addressing the issue. But we don’t do that. Again, not because it would be all that difficult or expensive (even though adtech is overly complicated by design to try and dodge oversight), but because the cash trough of consumer data monetization is just too lucrative.

Attempting to rein in just the telecom sector or just the airline sector is one thing (and you may have noticed we can’t even do that). But when you target the online consumer data space you’re going up against a massive coalition of industries with bottomless lobbying budgets, including “big tech,” telecom, software, health care, marketing, and more. All of which like things just the way they are: broken and hugely profitable.

What I still think will happen is eventually there will be a data scandal too massive and problematic to ignore, featuring a lot of very powerful and influential people. Likely a scandal that puts human lives at risk in some way. Only then will DC wake up to the perils of letting the adtech market run amok, and even then my faith in DC competently crafting helpful solutions in response remains shaky at best.

Filed Under: adtech, behavioral data, blackmail, congress, consumers, data brokers, ftc, hacking, hbo, john oliver, location data, privacy, privacy scandals

Apple Cripples Its Own Streaming App In Stand Off With Google

Overhype

from the meet-the-new-boss dept

As the battle for streaming market share accelerates, the fighting between companies has increasingly gotten dumber. Such as when AT&T’s streaming TV app was pulled from Roku customer hardware because the two companies couldn’t agree on data sharing parameters. Or when Google TV customers almost lost access to NBC content because those companies couldn’t negotiate like adults either.

Of course the bickering is happening on several levels. Between telecom and broadcasting giants and streaming hardware vendors. Or between streaming hardware vendors and big tech giants making inroads in TV. Or, when big tech companies bicker among themselves.

For example, Apple appears to have crippled content purchases in the company’s own app to avoid having to pay Google’s 30% commission fees. Ironic, given that Apple has been in a longstanding fight with Epic Games over Apple’s own commission fees. The feud has left users of the Apple TV app on both Google TV and Android TV unable to buy any content through the app:

“If this is the case, Apple is playing a dangerous game of hypocrisy, having recently defended its own fees after being sued by Fortnite maker Epic Games.”

When asked specifically if that’s what they were doing, Apple remained cryptic:

“We’ve updated the Apple TV app to comply with Google Play’s guidelines around purchases and rentals.”

Whether it’s cable TV retransmission feuds or big tech standoffs, this is all immeasurably confusing for consumers, who can’t be certain a service or app will work as advertised at any given moment. And as the financial stakes get bigger as streaming grows, this kind of petty bickering will only expand.

Filed Under: commissions, consumers, fees, feud, hardware, in-app purchasing, streaming, tv, video
Companies: apple, google

Corporations Are Being Forced To Take Consumer Complaints Back To Court After Arbitration Push Backfires Spectacularly

Legal Issues

from the the-devil-you-know dept

For years, AT&T worked tirelessly to erode its customers’ legal rights, using mouse print in its terms of service preventing consumers from participating in lawsuits against the company. Instead, customers were forced into binding arbitration, where arbitrators, chosen and paid by the companies under fire, unsurprisingly rule in favor of companies more often than not. Initially, the lower courts derided this anti-consumer behavior for what it was, noting that however brutally flawed the class action is, binding arbitration, at least the way we let companies designed it, in many ways made things worse.

But these lower court roadblocks quickly evaporated when the Supreme Court ruled in 2011 (Mobility v. Concepcion) that what AT&T was doing was perfectly OK. While lower courts saw this as an “unconscionable” abuse of consumer rights and the law, the Supreme Court bought into the ongoing myth that binding arbitration is a hyper-efficient, modern alternative to class actions. In reality, it shifted things to a form of binding arbitration that was costly, lopsided, and cumbersome for consumers, and less transparent for those used to visiting Pacer to dig up legal histories.

Fast forward to a few years ago, when a growing number of companies and services (like Fairshake) began streamlining the arbitration process, making it easier and less expensive for consumers (and yeah, class action lawyers). This shifted the balance of power back toward consumers, and starting in 2018 or so companies like Uber, AT&T and Comcast began to complain they were being swamped with arbitration feuds. Now, a year later, even giants like Amazon are being forced to take consumer complaints back to the courtroom, in part because a system they constructed to dodge accountability is no longer helping them do that:

“With no announcement, the company recently changed its terms of service to allow customers to file lawsuits. Already, it faces at least three proposed class actions, including one brought May 18 alleging the company?s Alexa-powered Echo devices recorded people without permission.

The retail giant made the change after plaintiffs? lawyers flooded Amazon with more than 75,000 individual arbitration demands on behalf of Echo users. That move triggered a bill for tens of millions of dollars in filing fees, according to lawyers involved, payable by Amazon under its own policies.”

To be very clear, the existing class action system is broken as well, usually doling out relatively pathetic payouts to impacted consumers, while class action lawyers get new boats. But the premise that the binding arbitration system (at least as implemented) was somehow better, at least in the way we implemented it in the States, has never been true. If you ask lawyers that represent companies like Amazon and AT&T, the fact that folks developed new systems that shifted the balance of power ever so slightly back toward consumers and class action lawyers is seen as terribly unfair:

“It has the potential to be pretty unfair to the company,? said Patrick Bannon, an employment lawyer at Seyfarth Shaw LLP who has represented clients facing mass arbitrations. The arbitration fees put intense pressure on businesses to settle, he said, ?whether the claim is valid or not.”

But if you ask the folks actually fighting for consumers (and not all of them are ambulance chasers), they see it as fair play:

“Companies thought they were getting out of liability altogether,? by adding arbitration clauses, said Chicago lawyer Travis Lenkner, whose firm filed the majority of the Amazon claims. ?Now they?re seeing exactly what they bargained for, and they don?t like it.”

In short, corporations (beginning with AT&T) spent the better part of the last decade fighting for an arbitration system that resulted in fewer payouts, fewer successful complaints, and less overall transparency. And while happy about that initially, the second the internet and technology shifted the balance of power in the other direction, they were eager to flee back to the devil they knew. It should be curious to see if other giants like AT&T also begin stripping binding arbitration out of their end user agreements, or if this is just a temporary setback on the path toward less accountability.

Filed Under: arbitration, binding arbitration, class action, class action lawsuits, consumer rights, consumers

Charter Spectrum Tells FCC Broadband Caps Are 'Popular' As It Tries To Kill Merger Conditions Preventing Them

Broadband

from the bad-things-are-good-for-you dept

To be very clear: American consumers don’t like broadband usage caps. At all. Most Americans realize (either intellectually or on instinct) that monthly broadband usage caps and overage fees are little more than monopolistic cash grabs. They’re confusing, frustrating price hikes on captive customers that accomplish absolutely none of their stated benefits. They don’t actually help manage congestion, and they aren’t about “fairness” — since if fairness were a goal you’d have a lot of grandmothers paying $5-$10 a month for broadband because they only check their email twice a day.

Enter U.S. cable giant Charter (Spectrum), which is currently in the middle of trying to get the FCC to kill the merger conditions applied as part of its 2015 $79 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. Those conditions, among other things, required that Charter adhere to net neutrality (despite the fact that the GOP has since killed net neutrality rules), and avoid usage caps and overage fees. Both conditions had 7 year sunset clauses built in, and Charter, eager to begin jacking up U.S. broadband consumer prices ever higher, has been lobbying to have them killed two years early.

Charter’s lobbying tactics so far have included giving money to groups like the Boys and Girls Club in exchange for gushing support for the elimination of the merger conditions, despite the fact that doing so would harm these groups’ constituents with higher prices.

Charter’s other major play apparently involves trying to tell the FCC that U.S. consumers really like monthly usage caps and annoying fees, restrictions the cable monopoly claims are “popular.” From a filing (pdf) spotted by Ars Technica:

“There is also evidence that some consumers?either those who do not consume a lot of data and/or those who are looking for a lower-cost plan?may want a service where prices are based on the amount of data used… These different plans are proliferating in the market because they offer consumers a cost-effective alternative to unlimited data plans that are more than adequate to meet their needs. The DC/UBP [data caps and usage-based pricing] Condition, however, prevents Charter from keeping pace with its competitors and offering consumers the kinds of plans they are looking for.”

This is a cute bit of logic U.S. broadband monopolies have long used that attempts to imply that caps and overage fees are about “fairness.” But they’ve never been about fairness. ISPs love to insist they just want to “experiment with price differentiation,” but you will never see a giant ISP offer a super cheap plan for people like your grandma that only check the Weather Channel website and their email a few times a day. And they don’t do that because the goal is to drive up the costs of everybody’s connection over the longer haul to please investors’ needs for higher quarterly returns.

And they can get away with this because in most U.S. markets, their only competition is a phone company that hasn’t upgraded its DSL lines since 2004 or so, or no competition at all. If the market actually saw competition and had functional regulatory oversight, you might see plans more closely tailored toward your actual usage. But in a market absent of real pricing competition and overseen by fecklessly captured regulators, what you get instead is endlessly higher prices, usually in the form of sneaky, misleading fees. Charter’s filing tries to tap dance around this problem as well:

“Opponents? claims that the BIAS market is not competitive are beside the point and overstated. The Conditions are unnecessary regardless of the level of BIAS competition because Charter, like other broadband providers, lacks the incentive or ability to discriminate against OVDs. OVDs are critical to the BIAS business and far too large and powerful to thwart with data caps or interconnection fees.

Only a cable monopoly with a 20 year track record of overcharging captive customers could try to argue that a lack of competition is “beside the point.” Incumbent telecom monopolies, eager to protect their dwindling TV revenues, have every incentive to use usage caps anti-competitively. And they already are. AT&T, for example, exempts its own streaming video service from its arbitrary usage caps, while financially penalizing users that use Netflix, Amazon, or any other competitor.

There is zero doubt that Charter wants to follow down this path as well. And it certainly will; it just wants to do so slowly to minimize backlash (picture the boiling frog fable with you as the frog). There’s also not much doubt that the captured, fact-phobic Trump FCC is eager to help them, proclaiming that letting a cable monopoly price gouge captive customers is about “restoring internet freedom,” or whatever half-baked justification is on the menu this week.

Filed Under: broadband caps, consumers, fcc, merger conditions
Companies: charter, charter spectrum